


Isa

by Dream Mender (Llewcie)



Series: Rune Cycle [3]
Category: The Dresden Files - All Media Types
Genre: Kissing, M/M, Magical Spaces, Nevernever, Reclaiming lost memories, Sexuality Crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-13 01:01:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5688514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Llewcie/pseuds/Dream%20Mender
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bob brings Harry to look for something that was taken from him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Isa

**Author's Note:**

> Isa is the Fortress. It’s the place where you go when you want the world to go away. When Harry in the books says he wants to crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after him, that’s Isa.

Harry walked upstairs, feeling self-conscious with only a damp towel slung about his hips, even though he had walked up the same stairs for years—often blithely chatting with Bob about spells or cases. Now, remembering the way that Bob had claimed him, even out of desperation, as the Teddy Bear Demon had scrabbled around in his brain looking for purchase, he felt a shiver of uncertain heat plunge through his belly. Without being able to acknowledge or argue, he had only been able to sprawl helpless under the spray of the shower as Bob made a play for him, body and soul… and won him, shutting out the intruder. Now, Harry was left reeling, his sexuality and sense of self confused and blinking like a stumbling, newly-birthed colt.

What Harry pondered to the exclusion of all else was how well it had worked. Should it have? Harry had never… but clearly, obviously, he had. And something about the way that Bob had mentioned his dreams had been nagging him

His foot fell on the top riser. Stairs climbed, he peered around the room for Bob. The ghost was conspicuously absent. “Bob?” he queried, his mouth dry.

“Good night, Harry,” came a gentle whisper. “I’ll see you soon enough.” The familiar voice in this new context gave him astonishing and lively gooseflesh. Harry fumbled with the sodden towel for a moment before scowling, disgusted with himself, and throwing it over the banister. It plopped wetly to the floor below. He hoped that he was imagining the rich, throaty chuckle that drifted into his peripheral hearing, but he somehow doubted it. After all the painful embarrassment and troubling exposure of the night, he hardly thought that boxers were necessary, so he slid between the cool, crisp sheets still naked, stroking his still-damp hair back from his forehead, and promptly fell into unconsciousness.

* * *

“Harry.”

Harry felt a gentle rocking, and the sound of lapping waves. He blinked and opened his eyes into darkness, or rather, stars. Night sky, but not like he ever saw in Chicago. No—this was the night sky that dreams were made of—the brilliant river of stars that didn’t even exist in this light-polluted century, except in the most remote places of his long-ago travels, when he had escaped the tyranny of his uncle and sought ‘enlightenment’ in both city and backwater, searching for that which he had still yet to find. He sat up carefully, the boat rocking underneath him, and saw Bob sitting across from him. And then, Harry _looked_ at Bob, his eyes darkening with curiosity.

Bob was _sitting_ , first of all, rather comfortably, in the stern what looked like a little fishing boat. He was wearing a pale linen shirt, buttons open to halfway down his breast and sleeves rolled halfway up his arms. The skin exposed was moon pale and smooth. Bob’s forearms and the hint of a rounded bicep were finely powerful—Harry recognized the muscle of an active and proficient swordsman, having learned which end of the rapier one was supposed to hold from the very man who now returned his searching gaze calmly. But even more so, on banded, even lines etched in golden ocher, rune sigils glowed darkly against Bob’s luminescent pale skin—arms and chest both. Harry was spellbound. “Is that… real?” His voice was just a whisper.

Bob blinked, for a moment clearly uncertain to what Harry was referring, and followed Harry’s eyes to his forearms. He stroked the pale skin and the rune sigils there with a long-fingered hand, and they brightened slightly at his touch. “Do you mean, if you were looking at my corporeal body, would you be able to see these?” Harry followed the gesture, nodding softly. “Only if you used your Wizard’s sight, Harry.” 

Wizard’s sight. The thought made Harry’s eyes widen. “What else would I see if I used the Sight on you, Bob?” Bob merely smiled, very slightly, and shook his head, as if he would not be responsible for what happened if Harry did such a foolhardy thing as try. The small gesture gave Harry vertigo. Here was Hrothbert of Bainbridge, Ghost, sitting in a little boat with him. What would the world be like if they walked it together? They gazed at each other for a long moment, Harry taking in the rest-- Bob’s dark, soft-looking pants and heavy leather boots that had clearly seen a great deal of wear. Work boots. Bob had work boots. They had scuffs on them. The universe shifted on its balance.

In a brief but heady moment of panic, Harry’s hands flew to his own body, eliciting another rich chuckle from his companion. He found something other than what he had gone to bed in, much to his embarrassed relief. Bob looked immensely amused; more that Harry thought he had the right to be. He scowled, but his lips kept wanting to quirk upwards.

The immediate question came to his lips. “Where is this? Is this a dream?”

Bob made a noncommittal shrug. “It’s… not exactly a dream. It’s more… a dream construct. You are dreaming. But we aren’t in your mind, precisely. You really don’t remember, do you?” He peered sadly at Harry, troubled, chewing a little on his lower lip as he did when he was trying to frame his over-complex thoughts into words, and that using only a single language. 

At this, Harry became more annoyed that curious—it wasn’t his fault if he couldn’t dredge up boats, or dream constructs, when there was nothing there to dredge. “If I did, I don’t anymore, Bob. And I’m really confused right now, so anytime you feel like you want to fill me in, you go right ahead.” And he stroked his hands down his soft linen shirt, which he liked very much, thanks, tucked his arms behind his head, and leaned back in the little skiff and closed his eyes. Two could play hard to get—it would just make the game a little longer, and it was a nice night, after all. 

The sudden rocking of the boat should have cued him to open his eyes, but never let it be said that Harry Dresden wasn’t one stubborn son of a witch. No—what flung open his eyelids was a warm, squeezing pressure on his thigh. Then—eyelids, limbs, mouth—everything flailed out all at once as his heart rate notched up to racing speed. His eyes came into focus to see Bob kneeling beside him in the bottom of the boat, his hand on Harry’s thigh, and a faintly smug look expression on his face. Harry gripped the sides of the little boat with white-knuckled hands, open-mouthed with astonishment.

“Would you like to be filled in now?” Sea green eyes sparkled mischievously at him, and the heat from Bob’s hand soaked through the thin pants Harry was wearing. Harry prickled fiercely with gooseflesh, and he searched a minute for his voice. He wanted to say something glib—something that didn’t make him sound like a little boy that had just realized that Santa Claus was real. But what came out was an overjoyed, heartfelt sob. And then another. He caught himself on the third, but by then Bob was already in his arms, somehow, and they were curled together on the bottom of the boat, clasped tightly, rocking together with the lapping waves, and Bob was kissing his hair, and he was fisting his hands in the soft linen of Bob’s shirt. Bob whispered something like, “Shhh, darling, shhh, my love… shhh.” 

A long time, maybe, but not long-- not long enough, certainly—Harry lay entwined with his mentor, making childlike promises to himself about never leaving. Bob’s hands stroked long strokes down his back, and at some point found their way up under Harry’s shirt to bare skin and soothed across his lower back and shoulder blades. Harry was fine with that; more than fine. He just pressed closer, wanting more contact, as if they could make up for all the time that had been lost. Somehow. 

Harry had ended up curled in slightly below Bob, so that his nose was pressed into Bob’s throat, and his mouth against the firm dip of his collarbone. With every inhalation, Harry breathed in the sea smell that wafted in over the boat and the same richness that he had gotten a brief scent of during Bob’s play at mortality—that heady cedarwood and herb-smoke and ozone scent that seemed embedded in his very skin. Harry breathed it in, entranced at the further grounding of this reality. 

“So, I thought you were having me on, about being able to touch me.” Harry reflexively squeezed his hands where they rested on Bob’s hips—he could feel the powerful muscle there stretched over bone, like a cat’s flanks poised to leap. As much as he wanted to explore the body of the man that had until mere moments before been an insubstantial puff of air, as Bob had in the past so bitterly put it, a significant part of his brain was beginning to question his motives, and so with an effort he stilled his hands. Bob had no such qualms, evidently, as the fingertips of one hand drew endless, delicate patterns on the skin of Harry’s back. 

“I wouldn’t torment you with something so painful to us both, had I a choice, Harry.” Bob threaded the fingers of his other hand through Harry’s soft-wool hair and kissed his temple again. Harry was exceptionally aware of the velvet texture of Bob’s lips, and the fullness that pressed a damp heat-mark against his skin. His body, without express permission, melted a little more into the firmer contours of Bob’s body—Harry told himself that what he was feeling was the repressed affection of a child too long held away from the embrace of a loved one. Whatever kept him in Bob’s arms. He forced himself to collect his thoughts—he thought, after all, that Bob might possibly expect an answer.

Still, both thoughts and voice were more than a little thready. “You still didn’t answer my question. What is this place? And if you knew about it, why haven’t we come here before?”

Bob sighed, a full-body exhalation that send warm flares all along Harry’s length. “Perhaps,” he murmured,” we should retire to a setting more conducive to discussion than the bottom of a boat.”

Harry blinked, his eyelashes flicking across the thin skin of Bob’s throat. He swallowed, and nodded. “Uh, yeah. Sure.” He removed himself from Bob’s embrace awkwardly, painfully, and sat in the seat near the oarlocks, feeling for all the world like he’d left half of his insides behind. 

Bob lay still in the bottom of the boat for a moment, studying him thoughtfully. Without actually moving, he suddenly seemed very far away. He pursed his lips, and then spoke, at the same volume as the light wind that danced across the water, “You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount, at the heart of time.” And then, righting himself gracefully and sitting at the rudder, he gazed softly at Harry. “Row, Harry, if you would. It’s not far. I’ll steer the course.”

Harry shrugged. “You usually do.” And he was glad for something to do that didn’t require thinking. He rowed straight and true—his muscles working easily, remembering the lessons of his youth. Water magic lessons had take place far out away from the boats on Lake Michigan, and Justin had often asked Harry to row his own boat—he recalled long afternoons when it was just him and Bob, out on the lake. Those had been good days. He smiled, despite the ache, and Bob smiled back at him, clearly sharing the same memories.

“Slow us down, Harry. Dock ahead.” Harry dragged the oars back in the water, pulling them to a halt, and they glided gracefully to the side of a small, bedraggled, empty platform in the middle of the water. There was nothing on it, and nothing around it. It was covered with kelp of all different colors and pocked with black mold and rusty tendrils that splayed in the water like exotic, poisonous fans. Half the planks looked rotted through. Harry glanced skeptically at Bob.

“What’s this, Bob? I think I’d rather stay in the boat.”

Bob pursed his lips. “Harry, do, for just a moment, and I will answer your questions.” He threaded his fingers together, looking very serious. “When you were seventeen, you discovered a way into the Nevernever through your dreams. You brought me in, and there, the two of us shaped a nigh impregnable fortress within a small pocket of the Dreaming. But the time you spent awake within the Dreaming took its toll, and your uncle noticed. He cornered me one day and forced me to tell him what we had been doing.” He scowled at the bottom of the boat. Harry felt a well of sorrow breach and burst from his heart, and guilt—a fine orchestra of accompanying emotions. Bob gathered himself and continued. “Justin could not reach you in the Nevernever—he wasn’t welcome in your Dreaming. So he did the only thing he knew how—he took your memory of ever doing the thing itself, and bound me not to speak of it until his death. Which,” he glanced wryly at Harry, “came much sooner than he thought.”

Harry was dumbstruck. “I made a fortress in the Dreaming? In the Nevernever? When I was seventeen?” Bob nodded thoughtfully, his eyes never leaving Harry’s. “So where is it? Is it gone, like my memory?”

“I don’t believe so. I don’t think Justin actually took anything from you, but rather, blocked your access. I’ve thought about attempting to bring you here before, but, honestly, Harry, I didn’t believe you trusted me enough.”

Harry flushed at that. He knew that Bob didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, and that made it even worse. “What made you change your mind?”

Bob canted his head slightly, his expression both affectionate and chagrined. “I realized that I was wrong many months ago, ever since the incident with Justin, and I have been working up the courage ever since.”

They look intently at each other for a long moment in silence, and then Bob stood with practiced ease in the boat. “You must go first, Harry. You always did.”

Harry glanced doubtfully at the small, rotted platform. “You mean this is it?” Bob quirked a smile at him, and nodded once. He shrugged, and stepped out of the boat on to the small ladder, and then set foot on the platform. It rocked slightly, but held, to Harry’s relief. No fortress appeared. Nothing changed at all. Bob’s forehead creased in a little frown. Harry held out his hand. “Come and join me. You said we did this together, right? So. We do this together.” He grinned self-effacingly. “Besides, maybe I need you to knock a few screws loose.” 

Bob nodded tersely, trying not to look concerned, and stepped up on the platform as well. Harry held out his hand again, and he took it, lacing fingers together. They stood facing, hands joined, for a long time. Nothing. Not even a glimmer. Even Harry looked disappointed. “I can’t remember, Bob. I’m sorry. Nada.”

“If there was something I had that I could use to cue your memory…” But if Bob had done Harry any service, it would have been to drill every lesson into his head until it was learned to the soil and root. There was nothing Harry knew at seventeen that he didn’t know now. Unless… a possibility that Harry might never have considered before that evening suddenly took root. And grew, like a giant sunflower, to tower over all other possibilities. He swallowed, took a deep breath, and plunged.

“Bob… were we… were we lovers? Is that part of the reason why Uncle Justin shut me away from this?” He fixed Bob with a gaze that was not to be turned away from. Bob lifted his chin slightly, answering after a moment’s careful thought.

“Not exactly. You were underage, and I was attempting to respect the laws of this society, as binding and stifling as they are. But there were moments when I thought that you loved me. And it has been a rare moment, Harry, that I remember not loving you.”

Harry’s heart burned at Bob’s confession, but he forged onward through Bob’s curious reluctance, feeling like he was using a back-hoe to find a china cup. “Have we ever been lovers, physically? Because I don’t know why I feel so touch-starved for you, Bob, but I do. And for some reason, I think I remember what you taste like, too. Why is that?” This was Bob, for Dagaz sake—his lifelong companion—whom he had grieved for, desperately, when he thought Bob had been lost, but whom he knew he had never touched, never tasted… Yet, Harry knew it was real—what Bob felt like in his arms, and not just that brief moment of dying; and the craving to be touched that had chased him through his dreams… all of this. It was real—the wanting. Recklessly, urgently real.

Bob licked his lips and swallowed, but gave no other answer. And suddenly, watching him like that, Harry couldn’t bear it any longer. He bent down _tilted upwards_ and hesitantly, with _racing_ peaceful heart _the world flickered_ soft embrace—Bob was holding him, fingers _in his hair_ on his shoulder now _where water was, now the golden glow of firelight on stone floors_ and their lips met _their lips met_ … the world broke outward.

* * *

They were standing in the middle of a huge den. Flagstones, roaring fire, lambskin rugs strewn about the place. There might even have been a massive poster of Jim Morrison above the fireplace—Harry paid it all only peripheral notice, because flooding back to his mind came everything—all the memories that his uncle had managed to repress. The fortress, and their long nights of creating and working in the Nevernever with the stuff of the Dreaming. The shock of being able to touch Bob, and his burgeoning longing that consumed all else until he could no longer think or act normally in the waking world. How he had been the one to betray it, finally, by his own inability to keep his desire for Bob secret under Justin’s hawk-like eye. 

Justin had taken it away out of spite, yes—anger that Harry could create something so complex within the unstable fabric of the Nevernever—a feat far beyond Justin’s own considerable talents. But he had also stolen Harry’s desire because to Justin, the Ghost was a teacher, not a lover, and Bob would teach, and Harry would learn. Justin’s world was black and white—a world without love… or rather, a world without the love of Hrothbert of Bainbridge. That was the world as Justin understood it. It became the world as Harry understood it. And Bob… Bob suffered in silence. Until now. 

Harry broke the world-rending kiss with a drop of his head. “I’m… so sorry.”

“Why, Harry?” Bob gripped the back of his neck tightly, breathing unsteadily. “For loving me? For creating this place so that you could hide away from your uncle the tyrant? Or for being too young and full of truth to hide it from the most callous and cynical bastard I’ve ever had the displeasure to work for?”

Harry could only shake his head, his lips lifted up in a grimace of pain. Bob cast around for somewhere to sit, and his eyes lit on the great hearthrug—a sheepskin of enormous size and depth. He led Harry to it, the younger man dazed and unresisting, and they lowered themselves down into the softness of it. Harry ended up slightly behind, leaning up against a low couch, and Bob sank back into him, allowing himself to be held, relaxing against the one man in the world he trusted to be at his back. With a shuddery sigh, Harry slid his hands down over Bob’s thighs and tucked his chin over Bob’s shoulder. They sat in silence for a moment, each aware of the other to the extreme limit of their physical senses.

At once, Bob knew that more of the story had to be told, but he took a long time, lingering against Harry’s heartbeat, in finding the right story to tell. “It was such a short time that we had. We shared the one kiss, just before you woke, Harry, and that was the day that your uncle forced me to confess. I didn’t have time to speak to you about it—I didn’t even have time to process it in my own mind. I’ve been left wanting ever since, wondering if you would develop similar feelings for me again… not knowing if I wanted to deal with the emotional turmoil of not being able to have you even if you did.” He closed his eyes, sighing softly. “It’s been… it’s been a little corner of Hell.” He stroked his bottom lip absently with a forefinger before clasping his hand over Harry’s.

Harry winced at the echo of phrase. “So, now what, Bob?”

“What indeed?” Bob arched an eyebrow, even if Harry couldn’t see it. “This feels on the whole a bit like Sleeping Beauty, but I’m uncertain which of us is the prince and which the girl.”

That made Harry grin, and he closed his eyes and slid his arms around Bob in a luxurious hug. “Since I did the kissing, you must be the girl.”

Bob elbowed him lightly. “I’m not the one waking up with the castle, darling. And besides, she had the face of a dog.”

Harry squeezed hard. “Just what are you implying”? And then he did a mental double-take. “Wait, that story was real?”

Bob smiled, turning his head so that he could almost look Harry in the eye. “Let’s just say that waking you has already been a great deal more satisfying.”

**Author's Note:**

> [In the boat, Bob quotes from a poem called Unending Love by Rabindranath Tagore]


End file.
